Crypto Weekly: What is Ripple? Why is Ethereum so slow? ICO tokens being delisted?
This week, I break down why Ripple may not be as decentralized as some think, why Ethereum fees are skyrocketing and transaction times are taking hours if not days, plus ICO tokens being delisted on popular exchanges.
When I signed up for Ripple it was a service for P2P and IOUs. It was a total trip to log back in a couple years later to see how they changed their business model to focus on banks, and my tokens then represented nothing in their new business model. I was like... Noppeee... XRP is not for me and got out. Definitely felt lied to about the direction of the platform. BTW the waybackmachine can verify their early marketing was p2p and iou focused.
I did the same thing Max... Back in 2006. I thought it was really cool tech. I was equally surprised when this other Ripple company showed up and was giving away a new XRP token to Boinc participants. If I'd put a few hundred $ into XRP back then if be retired already.
I believe that Ripple Inc bought the original Ripple IOU system - or it was some of the original founders?
Interestingly we are basically reinventing the original Ripple concept with payment channels off the ETH and BTC blockchains (Raiden and Lightning). I think that validates the original idea was sound. Only dPoS based blockchains are doing anything different that doesn't need channels, because they are just fundamentally fast in the first place.
The centralised nature of Ripple and their huge reserves are exactly what is making it attractive to banks. Bank interest in using XRP was the original rumour that drove it up, plus the company locking up their reserves in contracts so they could not dump all the 60% outstanding into the market at one go. But you're right of course, this isn't what people usually think of as a cryptocurrency. Caveat emptor! (Buyer beware).
I had not heard of the alleged weakness in Ripple consensus. That's worrying. Ditto the freeze assets. But now that Stellar and Ripple both have compliance features built in to allow anti money laundering etc. rules to prevent you trading. Maybe that is the same thing. Both rely on gateways or anchors and ultimately every single crypto relies on some service of you want to turn your digital assets into fiat - unless you want to trust some shady guy on the street with a sack of cash.
Personally I think 2018 will become the year of the decentralised exchange, especially autonomous ones. That will make it extremely hard for centralised authorities to force tokens to be delisted and such. See my article from a few days ago: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@o1o1o1o/2018-is-the-year-of-decentralized-exchanges